The Shape of History

Carr's 1961 lectures on why the facts do not speak for themselves and why you should study the historian before you study the history. Still the standard first book.

Trouillot shows how silences enter the record at four separate points, and uses the Haitian Revolution, an event Europe declared unthinkable while it was happening, to prove it.

Gaddis on how historians think: scale, abstraction, contingency, and why history is closer to cartography than to physics.

An anthropologist and an archaeologist demolish the story in which agriculture leads inevitably to hierarchy. Contested, enormous, and the most exciting history book of the last decade.

Scott's argument is that the earliest states depended on grain because grain can be seen, counted and taxed, and that plenty of people sensibly ran away from them.

An archaeologist on what has stayed constant about urban life since the first cities: density, rubbish, strangers, specialisation and the pull that keeps drawing people in.

The first work of history in the European tradition, and much stranger than its reputation: ethnography, tall tales, and a serious attempt to explain why Greeks and Persians fought.

Rome from the founding myths to the extension of citizenship in 212, written by someone unusually interested in the people who were not senators.

The founding work of Chinese historiography, written after its author chose castration over suicide in order to finish it. Read the Burton Watson selections.

Europe and the Mediterranean from 400 to 1000, treated as a period with its own logic rather than as a gap between Rome and the Renaissance.

A world history written from Central Asia outwards, in which Europe is a late arrival at somebody else's trading system.

World history narrated as it looks from inside the Islamic world, in which the Crusades are a border incident and 1492 is a defeat. Written for the general reader and very readable.

A physicist on the Arabic scientific tradition: translation, algebra, optics, medicine, and the awkward fact that Europe's recovery ran through Baghdad and Cordoba.

Muslim, Jewish and Christian Spain over seven centuries, told through poets, viziers and libraries. Romantic in places, and the argument is worth having.

Five thousand years in one volume by a writer who does not assume you know any of it. The best single-book route into Chinese history for an outsider.

The 1860 book that created the Renaissance as a period and as an idea about the discovery of the individual. Read it as evidence about the nineteenth century as well.

Europe's house divided, from 1490 to 1700, written with an ear for what people actually believed and how much of it was about anything other than doctrine.

The book that made historians take biology seriously: maize, potatoes, horses, smallpox. The most consequential thing about 1492 was not gold.

The French and industrial revolutions treated as one event with two faces, 1789 to 1848. The first volume of the best narrative history of the modern world.

The Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture, written in 1938 by a Trinidadian Marxist who saw it as the only successful slave revolt in history and treated it as a revolution rather than a rising.

Pomeranz compares the Yangzi delta with England around 1750 and finds them far closer than expected, which moves the explanation for industrialisation onto coal and colonies.

Anderson's claim is that a nation is an imagined community, made possible by print, the census and the map. The most influential book on nationalism ever written.

Said on how Europe produced knowledge about the East that served the governing of it. Contested for fifty years, and you cannot follow the argument without reading it.

The Congo Free State, run as one man's private property, and the first modern human rights campaign that exposed it. Narrative history at its most effective.

Davis argues that the great famines of the 1870s and 1890s in India, China and Brazil were not natural disasters but the meeting of El Nino with market ideology and empire.

The first month of the First World War, reconstructed hour by hour. Tuchman's subject is how intelligent people walked into something none of them wanted.

One volume, genuinely global, and strongest where most accounts are weakest: the Pacific, China, and the war's effect on civilians.

Written as Algeria's war was ending by a psychiatrist who had treated both torturers and the tortured. The most uncomfortable and most necessary book on decolonisation.

Westad treats the Cold War as a global conflict fought mostly in the poor world, which is where nearly all of the dying happened.

The anticommunist mass killings of 1965 in Indonesia and the programme they became a model for. Journalism built on archives and on interviews with survivors.

Europe from 1945 to 2005 in nine hundred pages, east and west given equal weight, by a historian who thought the continent had not finished dealing with its memory.